Fabricated snack products prepared from doughs comprising starch-based materials are well-known in the art. These doughs typically comprise dehydrated potato products such as dehydrated potato flakes, granules, and/or flanules. The doughs can also comprise a number of other starch-based ingredients, such as wheat, corn, rice, tapioca, barley, cassava, oat, sago, and potato starches, as well as flours. These other starch-based ingredients are typically included in the doughs in lesser quantities than the dehydrated potato products.
The advantages of preparing such food products, for example, potato snacks, from a dough rather than from sliced, whole potatoes include homogeneity or uniformity in the end food products and the ability to more closely control the separate steps involved in the preparation of the food products. Additionally, preparing fabricated snack products from dough provides the flexibility to formulate such products according to the availability of raw materials and to consumer desires for various textures and flavors.
Rice flour is a material that is available globally. Its characteristic flavor, which can be described as clean and neutral makes it suitable for use in corn, potato, rice and other snacks. Furthermore, rice flour is suitable for use as the primary ingredient for making both low intensity flavored snacks, such as herbal flavors or sweet flavors, as well as high-intensity flavored seasoned snacks. This is possible because the rice flour's neutral flavor does not compete with that of the seasoning.
Although rice flour can be included in fabricated snack doughs, its inclusion can lead to processing and product quality issues which are not easily solved. For example, the addition of rice flour can result in inelastic doughs that are difficult to cook, dry, or fry. Furthermore, the fabricated snack products resulting from these doughs can be too soft, with a cracker-like texture and an undesirable raw taste, or too hard and dense. This is, in part, caused by the difficulty in cooking rice flour, as rice starch has one of the highest gelatinization temperatures among the starches (72° C.) available for use in snacks. That is, such high gelatinization temperatures prevent the starch in rice flour from being cooked completely to avoid a raw taste and ‘tooth packing’ of the resulting products.
There are substantial benefits to increasing the amount of rice flour in fried snack products. It has surprisingly been found that dough based on rice flour absorbs less fat upon frying than dough based on potato and other flours. This benefit, however, is not necessarily proportional to the amount of rice flour used. Likewise, in most areas of the world, rice flour is more readily available, and less expensive than potato flour. It has also been found that a blend of rice flours with specific functionality can absorb significantly lower water content during the dough making process, which in turn reduces the finished product fat content. Also, it has been found that specific chemical modifications of rice starch have a unique functionality in snack formulations, providing additional product crispiness and facilitating the dough-making process. These advantages make rice ingredients a desirable raw material for the manufacture of snacks.
But as the concentration of standard rice flour in the dough increases, the processing problems associated with rice flour also increase dramatically. Processing issues include weak and dry dough that requires high water levels to process. Increasing the water content of the dough can increase the fat content of the final product. Adding 10-20%, by weight, of standard rice flour to potato flour based dough, requires a certain degree of process manipulation to make an acceptable snack product. But if the rice flour is increased to, for example, 70-90%, by weight, the processing problems are drastically increased, and it is very difficult to reduce the water required to form the dough. And if standard rice flour is used in such high quantities, the resulting snack product has a substantially dense texture and poor mouth feel when compared to a potato based snack. More specifically, potato based snack products have a fast melt down which yields a light and crispy texture, whereas rice based snack products have either a slower melt down with a glassy, hard texture such as found in Japanese crackers, or a soft, chewy and tooth packing texture such as found in rice cakes. Consumers have grown accustomed to the crispy texture and eating quality of potato, corn, and wheat based snacks, and breaking from that established equity is difficult.
There are other rice snacks currently available such as extruded rice based snacks. While these commercially available products enjoy some consumer acceptance, they are still not substitutes for, nor do they provide a crispy, crunchy and light texture comparable to that found in potato chips.
Hence, there exists a need for formulae and processes for making fabricated snack products with relatively high concentrations of rice flour, while maintaining certain textural qualities that consumers prefer. And there is a need for a dough made from a rice flour composition that has a significantly lower water content. And there is a need for a rice crisp product that is made from a sheet of dough or extruded, and then fried, partially fried and then baked, or baked.
There exists also a need for formulae and processes for making snacks with relatively high rice levels with lower fat content, but with the texture and taste of full fat snacks.
This and other advantages of the invention will become apparent from the following disclosure.